Pirate Party Founder Rick Falkvinge Launches News Service

New submitter lillgud writes: Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, has unveiled a news service to compete against "oldmedia." The news stories will be three sentences in length, and distributed within shareable images. Falkvinge says this obviates certain parts of the industry — for example, there will be no need for clickbait headlines, because there's nothing to click on. The business model is based around advertising, but those ads will simply be a watermark on the image. Thus, no worries about adblock, and no concerns about ad networks collecting information from users. The service is targeted to be operational in Q3. Each writer will be paid in accordance to a revenue sharing model, and Falkvinge's goal is for each part-time writer to receive €125/month in exchange for four stories (12 sentences).

Comments

Good initiative

[Skarjak]

I like this guy. Instead of bitching about adblock, he tries to adapt to it. More people should be willing to adapt to changing realities rather than crying to legislators so they can rig the game for them.

Re:Thanks, I'll pass

[meta-monkey]

I'm concerned too about the "politically motivated" part.

For instance, I agree that there is a problem with excessive use of force by police in America. Reddit, however, has a massive boner for any kind of story that depicts police as bloodthirsty maniacs. So you'll see a front page story with a headline like "Man Shot 47 Times by Police Just For Asking For Directions." And you open it up and find out the guy was raging on PCP, firing at cops yelling "Which way to hell pigs?! 'Cause that's where I'm sending you!" The authors of such titles are far more concerned with pushing their narrative than informing people.

It's bad journalism to assign motives to people that they didn't tell you and you can't back up with facts. Just report the facts, and leave the opinions to the comments section.

I support the Pirate Party, but I'm wary of any "news service" run specifically by any political party.